Redesigning how funds sell themselves

For RIAs building private market programs on the Opto platform, fundraising momentum matters. Growth depends on advisors actively moving client capital into funds. Available offerings surface as cards on the homepage and a dedicated listings page, which both link to details pages with the full fund story. But advisors weren't engaging. Most indicated interest directly from homepage cards without ever visiting the details pages, skipping the content meant to help them understand and get excited about a fund. The details pages themselves were static, data-heavy, and gave chief investment officers (CIOs) at the firms no way to tell the story of what makes their funds compelling.

From my interviews with stakeholders across the sales and investment operations teams, three themes emerged:

• Content gaps. Important data points like investor eligibility, return profile, and other legal structure details weren't displayed. Advisors lacked the information needed to confidently recommend funds to clients.
• Low engagement. Advisors bypassed fund details pages entirely. Poor content hierarchy, static text, few interaction points, and homepage cards that showed too much upfront removed any reason to click deeper.
• No narrative. CIOs had no way to tell the story of their fund. What makes this fund different? Who is it for? Why should an advisor be excited about it? The page presented facts without a point of view, which is what advisors needed to translate excitement to their end investors.

I looked at offering pages across investment platforms as well as high-end product sites. The investment platforms confirmed what wasn't working: dense layouts, information overload, no visual breathing room. The luxury sites revealed what could work: reliance on visuals to convey a premium feel, minimal text that lets the product speak for itself, and key metrics positioned prominently near the top rather than buried in tables.

I explored three directions for the details page, each testing a different hypothesis about what would drive engagement:

1. Data-heavy. Maximizes information density. Efficient for reference, but the goal was to create excitement. Advisors needed to feel something, not just parse numbers.

2. Visual-heavy. Full-bleed imagery, minimal text, cards replacing tables. This option provides a striking first impression, but doesn't hold up when advisors need specifics.

3. Narrative-heavy. Guides the advisor through the fund's story section by section, from positioning to modeled performance to underlying investments.

After gathering feedback across stakeholders, the narrative direction won. Visual and data elements are woven in where they serve the story rather than compete with it.

The redesign introduced a clear hierarchy by leading with the numbers that matter most, building the case with strategy, modeled performance, and underlying investments, and closing with due diligence items. New elements like strategy descriptions and a positioning statement in the CIO's voice below the hero image helped build the narrative. Across all touch points, information is progressively disclosed to keep visuals clean while giving advisors access to depth on demand.

The existing design system was dense and utilitarian. The narrative direction required a more editorial feel than the boxy containers, little breathing room, and full-width tables could deliver. I explored what offerings could look like unconstrained. Elements like generous whitespace, typographic hierarchy, imagery as a first-class element, and subtler separators influenced the subsequent design system refresh.

The narrative framework extended to new content types later on, including qualitative fund updates and AI-generated talking points for advisors.